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Under the Dome

The Monterey County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday voted unanimously to accept the recommendations of a secret panel that told them that their own Natividad Medical Center is a better choice for a trauma center than the competing Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital.

Then an imperious staff told its own bosses — the five supes — that they wouldn’t be given any information about how the secret panel arrived at its recommendation.

Really? So much for transparency in government.

Oh, and the hard-working folks at SVMH simply got screwed in the process.

Some of you might find it funny that I just wrote that. After all, I’ve reported some tough stories over the past couple of years about SVMH. And, I’m pretty sure that I will again in the future. Like all human institutions, it’s a flawed place and it’s my job to cover both its flaws and foibles as well as its wins and successes.

So though I’ll never be branded an SVMH cheerleader, I am here to tell you that the south Salinas institution was the recipient of serious raw deal on this trauma center thing Tuesday and that it deserved better.

I do give partial credit to Supervisors Jane Parker and Fernando Armenta. They at least expressed concerns about just blindly accepting the recommendation of the secret panel.

“This is nerve-wracking to not have any information going into this,” Parker said.

Before the supes took their unanimous vote, Armenta talked openly about the board having a credibility problem given the situation.

“This is almost like we’re negotiating with ourselves here,” Armenta said.

But what the supes should have done, however, is demand that the process be halted, that information about how the panel made its recommendations be disclosed — to the supes, if not to the public — and that, until that happened, they would not take up the matter again.

But we here at TheCalifornian.com have learned that sometimes government folks need to be nudged — OK, shoved — a little in order to do the right thing.

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As a result, this newsroom filed a California Public Records Act request for the very information that staff and the secret panel chose not to share with anyone. County Counsel Charles McKee is likely to tell us to get lost, but we’ll keep you abreast of how our quest for the information goes.

To be sure, I can see how physically, NMC might make a better candidate for a trauma center than SVMH. It has, after all, a built-in helipad and its campus is in a far more open and less residentially dense part of town.

On the flipside, SVMH has worked hard to become one of the best hospitals in the nation for patient safety and care. Its affiliation with the Stanford University Hospital and Medical Clinics means that it already has access to nationally renowned physicians and to medical technologies that NMC can only dream about.

But again, because the county’s lawyers say that not even our elected leaders can know, we slobs out here in the public remain in the dark.

I’ve reported on state, regional and local government for years and, frankly, I can sadly report that transparency in government in California is actually getting worse. After all, transparency competes daily with the control of government staffers, who generally find that being transparent makes their jobs harder.

And unlike the electeds, who at least have to face their constituencies every once in a while, staffers and bureaucrats generally never have to face or confront directly members of the tax-paying public.

Folks, make no mistake: Tuesday was a dark day for sunshine in local government here in Monterey County.

Score one for government secrecy, the hegemony of staff and zero for the public and its right to know.

Jeff Mitchell covers Salinas Valley politics and government. Under the Dome, an opinion column, appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday in print and online. For quick political hits, check out Under the Dome –The Blog available most every day at: www.theCalifornian.com.